ive been looking forward to this chapter. i think it was the most talked about religion in my childhood with my new age parents. i love the movies Little Buddha and Seven Years in Tibet. i've read the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. and lately ive been following the Dalai Lama on Twitter. i think part of what is so appealing about it is the way the Buddha is portrayed. i grew up seeing all the depressing images of christianity. all the artwork is so dark and sad and Christ is always on the crucifix or about to be on it looking sick and hungry and beaten. but in Buddhism the Buddha is just sitting around with a smile on his face. and then there's the Laughing Buddha. adorable! the artwork is so beautiful and peaceful. love it.
so the chapter starts off with the story of Siddhartha who becomes Buddha. i recommend seeing the movie Little Buddha for this. it's beautiful and shows the story well. plus it shows lots of other aspects of Buddhism. plus Keanu Reeves plays Siddhartha. what?!? he goes from being a prince born in luxury who becomes an ascetic who starves himself for his spirituality and then finds The Middle Path. he becomes The Awakened One. he was sitting under a tree and vowed to stay there till he figured out "the secret of our everlasting wandering from rebirth to rebirth." after 49 days it came to him. he saw that all things are impermanent and ever changing and we suffer because we wish the world were otherwise.
buddhism is a lot like Hinduism in many ways. they both believe in reincarnation and karma. and they both want to be free of the cycle of rebirth because this world is full of suffering and happiness is only temporary. in Buddhism the problem with the human condition is the karma-fueled cycle of life, death and rebirth (samsara, same as Hinduism) but the solution is nirvana, which means extinguishing suffering. according to Buddhism there are Four Noble Truths: life is marked by suffering, but suffering has an origin, so it can be eliminated, and the path to elimination of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path.
The 8-fold path includes: right understanding, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. that all sounds like a lot of pressure to me. to be "right" about so many aspects of your life. but it all comes down to "be kind, be wise, be mindful." that i can work with. it's the idea that human beings can solve the human problem on our own, without help from above. there is an emphasis on experience over belief. in fact, Buddhists don't see Buddha as being divine, he was a path finder and Buddhism spread because it had a powerful story. Buddha "taught his listeners not to be seduced by the authority of any text, tradition, or teacher (even himself), but to discover for themselves how to live an authentically human life."
There are three main branches of Buddhism: Mahayana (which is very similar to Hinduism and is the most popular because you don't have to be a monk to reach nirvana), Theravada (where you do have to be a monk to achieve nirvana but if you aren't you can get merit towards a better life next time), and Vajrayana which is also known as Tibetan Buddhism and is the one the Dalai Lama practices. Tibetan Buddhists use mantras or sacred chants, they have reverence for the lama (guru or teacher), they have many practices that are passed down in secret from lama to student, and they have practices that are derived from Tantra. you might be surprised to find that most Buddhists don't meditate. much the way Hindu's have devotion to the God of their choice, some Buddhists show devotion to the Buddha (there are many) or bodhisattva of their choice.
there are some ideas in Buddhism that are hard to explain and even harder to grasp. they say there is no self and no soul. which gets kinda confusing cuz, then, what are we talking about here? and then there's the idea of emptiness. it sounds daunting and depressing but it really isn't. it's freedom. i'm not gonna try and it explain it cuz i wouldn't know how to on here. so if you wanna learn more about it, just go look it up. but there is an ''implication of emptiness that we are all already Buddhas. It is the dualistic mind that sees Buddhahood as something different from us." they say that nirvana isn't something you have to wait for until you are dead. you can reach it here in this life. and that being a Buddha is not being an "omnipotent spiritual superman", but becoming a true human being.
the idea of empitness says that there is no distinction between samsara and nirvana. it says that nirvana is inevitable. it is already here. "all we need to do is step out of the closed either/or mind to open the heart of emptiness. Samsara is nirvana if you just accept things as they are. ...There is nowhere to go, nothing to wait for. This is it." there is another great part of the book that says "you can't get to nonduality with the dualistic mind. You can't think your way to nirvana; it comes when you are out of your mind." i love that. sorry if that was hard to understand, the idea of duality and nonduality is not something i wont to go into here. i learned about it in my Mysticism and Meditation class at OCC. this might seem strange and foreign to a lot of my christian friends and relatives, but it's the most familiar religion to me. in a lot of ways i totally get it.
i wanna learn more about Buddhism, i especially wanna get some of those books from the Dalai Lama. i love his peaceful smile. it's funny though, sometimes when i read his tweets about always being kind and patient with everybody i find myself thinking "you've never driven in LA traffic." i'm not sure if i will ever call myself a Buddhist, but it's a lot more likely than me calling myself a follower of any other religion. and now i wanna watch Little Buddha again. wish i had it on DVD.
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